The View | Explaining the fine line between absolute and relative poverty
Hong Kong’s poverty problem is about income security that allows quality education for children, quality health care, and owning a home to protect the lifetime purchasing power of hard-earned savings
Poverty is a topic that occasionally makes headlines in the newspapers and attracts a variety of commentators.
In a lot of these discussions reference is made to the poverty line as a measure of the extent of poverty in society. The poverty line is used in two senses: to denote absolute poverty and relative poverty.
One of the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations was to reduce the number of people in the world that are living in extreme poverty and hunger. The underlying conception was absolute poverty, defined operationally as living on less than US$1 a day (later raised to $1.50).
The purpose of this measure is to promote economic development in countries with large concentrations of poor populations, and lift them out of absolute poverty.
The most successful achievement of economic globalisation of the past few decades has been to pull 600 million people in the Third World out of dire poverty, with the largest gains concentrated in six countries: China, South Korea, India, Poland, Indonesia and Thailand.
The backlash against global economic integration today is because this success has not been shared with most of the rich world, where many countries have embraced a different notion of poverty, that of relative poverty.
